


worth the candle

by arriviste



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 12:42:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29933595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arriviste/pseuds/arriviste
Summary: “I cannot linger here,” Andreth says. That is a truth she knows. This is only a doorway.“Still we might snatch a little time,” says Aegnor.-Aegnor and Andreth meet in the Halls.
Relationships: Aegnor | Ambaráto/Andreth | Saelind
Comments: 26
Kudos: 63





	worth the candle

He is waiting in the Halls for her, and he looks just as he did when she first loved him, when Dorthonion was still green and his profile was heartbreakingly pure against the blue sky. 

She hadn’t expected that he would wait. Who could have guessed that their souls would pass through the same gate, even if they took different paths beyond it?

Finrod, of course. But Andreth has never put her faith in his guesses.

Her memory has never been as perfect as his. Yet she would have sworn to Finrod that she had forgotten nothing of his brother, not a detail. She would have been wrong. She has forgotten, and the return of what she has lost is a strange thing. Nothing of it is new, and all of it was beloved, and yet she had mislaid them and now she has them again, as though she took her eyes from him for only a moment.

He still has the springing fair hair, the fine-grained skin as pale as milk. The blue eyes, wide at the sight of her, are the same; so are the parted lips, as if breath and sound together have stilled on his tongue.

But Andreth is not young any longer. Or rather, she is not only young. She is old and young at once, wise and foolish together, her hands spotted like a winter apple one moment and smooth and fresh the next.

How he had looked at her when she was young. 

She has been many things since she knew him – wise woman, aunt, teacher, friend. She has seen many young girls go greensick over a beautiful face, over the brief promise of morning before it dims, and she knows that disease. Those are not her symptoms. If they had been, he would have faded into a soft-edged memory, one she might have taken out now and again in her old age to laugh over, remembering how it had been, to love so madly and for so little reason.

He has always been a hook in her living flesh.

He is looking at her, solid and real, forgotten and never forgotten. 

She grew used to Finrod, over the years, as much as one could grow used to a creature spun out of gold and moonbeams, to fair immortal flesh and eyes that held in them light beyond light. She never had time to grow used to _him_. What little time they might have had he denied her.

He is still looking at her. 

She is not used to him. She never was. 

It was never his beauty that made her know him for her own heart, alien as he was. It was the fierceness in his eyes and the piercing sadness that came into them as he looked on her for the first time. It was the burning purity of his spirit, the sharp edges that were her own again.

Andreth had not imagined that his sorrow might become her own as well, passed between them like a cough.

She is not that green girl in the long grass any longer. He is not lying with his head in her lap, and her fingers are not tangled in his wild hair under the blue sky. There is no lake, no blurred mirror in which to meet his eyes for the first time, to look up from the poor copy into the full perfection of his face.

But he is looking at her like she is, he is, they are.

“Andreth,” says Aegnor. 

Peerless knight, melancholy would-be lover, bound in bonds of iron to a duty he thought would never end. His golden hair is a nimbus of light in the dark of this place between the worlds, a halo of fire around his head and shoulders. 

He died in flames. The fire took him, and Dorthonion, and her youth. 

“You waited,” she says.

In the long years after he refused her, she learned to swallow grief, to sleep with it roiling in her belly. To draw blood with her tongue. She could say now, _This is a first._ She could say, _This is not the order of things you expected, is it?_

Or, _If I had been the first to come hence, I would not have waited for thee._

It would be untrue.

“I did,” he says. 

They are destined for different paths. She can feel it, with the certainty that she doubted while she lived. She had reached for the fire anyway, and burned her fingers.

“I cannot linger here,” Andreth says. That is also a truth she knows. This is only a doorway. 

“Still we might snatch a little time,” says Aegnor.

“Those are my words!” 

His perfect mouth bends at last into a smile of surpassing sweetness. “But should they not have been mine?”

She's too old for this. 

She is not old at all. 

“Are you solid enough for me to hit you?”

Aegnor holds his hands out to her, and they are flesh, or they feel like it. They are touching again for the first time in forever; for the last time in forever.

Andreth turns her face up to him. He bends his to her. 

He is kissing the girl he knew in Dorthonion with stars in her eyes and in her hair. She is kissing a sad-eyed warrior with a pure and flaming heart. He is kissing ancient Saelind with her gnarled fingers and her aching bones, and middle-aged Andreth with her, and all the Andreths in between. She is swallowing fire.

He does not release her as she changes in his arms, back and forward and forward and back, and does not change at all. He holds her face tightly in his palms, and she digs her nails into the flawless skin under his hair at the back of his neck.

In the end it is she who must lift her head, who must step away. There is a current drawing her on. Andreth bites his lip first, and Aegnor looks at her like she is made of light when he lets her go.

“Will you not stay with me?” 

Would you ask a bird to take to the water, for love of a fish?

“I am going on,” Andreth says, and licks his blood from her teeth. “But if Finrod is right, we will meet again one day, when the world ends and the stars fall.”

“But Finrod is _never_ right,” Aegnor says, like the younger brother he is, and the corner of his mouth lifts, sweet and sad. 

_You admit now that you should not have listened to him?_

She could say it. But what would be the point?

Where Andreth is going, she does not know. Still she asks, “Will you not come with me?” 

Aegnor gives her no answer but his rueful smile. He turns his hands over and holds them out to her, as though to reveal the invisible chains on his wrists. 

He is tethered to the world in a way she is not, made to be reworked into its patterns. When Andreth was younger, she had thought his kind was made of stronger and more tensile stuff, and gritted her teeth at her threadbare impoverishment. Now she is going on, into the dark, and she is glad of her airiness.

But she hopes that Finrod will be right, and that she will have to admit it to him, one day beyond the stars.

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr [here.](https://arrivisting.tumblr.com/post/645148911539044352/worth-the-candle-arriviste-the-silmarillion#notes) Comments/kudos v. appreciated right now!


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